If you want to drive for about 15 miles or so within Palestinian territory to move from Jerusalem to Jericho, the Google Maps app will tell you that "no road can be found there". The Waze Waze warns: "Beware: this destination Exist within a high-risk area or prohibited by Israelis under the law. "
If you click "Confirm Flight", the application directs you, but not all the way, and when you pass from the territory under the Israeli occupation to the West Bank, the information provided by the Waze application ends, you need to change the settings in order to continue and allow access to Areas that the application describes as "high-risk", even where GPS coverage tends to be limited.
In case you want to cross the invisible partition line often between the Israeli occupation territories and the Palestinian territories, the best option is to close Waze and open Maps.Me, an open-source Belarusian application that is currently owned by the Russian Mail.Ru Group. The Internet connection is dependent on OpenStreetMap data, an important feature in the occupied territories where 3G services are not provided to Palestinian service providers.
The Maps.Me application is more than just a source of trends, as it is a database of roads, schools, squares, shops and other landmarks drawn by programmers through open source mapping (a system similar to Wikipedia where anyone can add information) And international NGOs over the past decade to increase cartography in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and put Palestine literally and metaphorically on the map.
the border
In the 1967 Six-Day War, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, and the annexation of East Jerusalem, was a move largely rejected by the international community. President Donald Trump recently declared that the United States recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of the Israeli occupation state. Since the mid-1990s, the PA, based in Ramallah, has had near-autonomous control of parts of the West Bank, called Area A and Area B. At the same time, illegal Israeli settlements under international law have expanded in the largest part of the West Bank, Area c. At the same time, Hamas ruled Gaza, a movement that the United States and Europe consider a terrorist group. Gaza was besieged by the Israeli occupation and Egypt after a civil war in 2007 between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority that led to the Hamas takeover.
In such circumstances, the issue of access to good navigation maps and applications is not just an issue of access, but rather the recording of Palestinian life on the ground and giving people in this part of the earth access to information and movement as is the case in Israeli territory.
According to the co-founder of Maps.me Maps Alexander Borisk, the application began its work in 2011 in Belarus and has so far recorded about 80 million downloads, and the company moved to the Russian capital Moscow after the acquisition by the Russian Internet company at the end of 2014.
The application works on a simple premise based on open-source information available through OpenStreetMap.org, a free, open-source resource-based, open-source service to operate its own map and navigation tools with data. The team decided to make the maps accessible for download and offline use after One member of the team visited Cuba, hungry for the Internet.
For West Bank and Gaza, programmers using OpenStreetMap maps fill in street names and add shops, restaurants, schools, parks, squares, and mosques. Once the application is downloaded, any user can add their own pins to identify any untrusted side road or shop they frequented.
"I think everything is politicized," Nasser Abu Jabal, a worker with the spatial geography team at the Palestinian Authority's local government ministry, told Wired. Nasser creates maps and data collection on the West Bank and Gaza, including agricultural points and infrastructure sites, which individuals or organizations can use as a basis for further mapping.
However, the application is still considered too late compared to Google Maps and Waze, as there are places that are difficult to find depending on the English translation or spelling of the programmer. The application also tells you that the distance of the 12-mile journey between Jerusalem and Ramallah in the West Bank You need 15 minutes, without counting checkpoints, winding roads and traffic that usually add between 45 and 90 minutes to flight.
Cartography Industry
The WIZ application, developed by the Israeli occupation, is an indispensable resource within occupied territory, with various features such as warning of speed radars on the roads, but things are becoming increasingly complicated in the West Bank, where Area C has many new roads built to link disputed settlements With the rest of the territories under Israeli occupation authority.
Waze is directing drivers to these main and fast roads, but this could be a problem for people in cars with Palestinian license plates, following restrictions and prohibitions on some roads and streets. "Waze may study the restrictions on Palestinian license plates to assess their support. "
"When you enter a part of the West Bank under the control of the Palestinian Authority, you are told that you are in dangerous and forbidden areas of Israeli occupation," said a spokesman for Waze. "The Israelis are prohibited from entering Areas A and B. The application provides settings that support this restriction, Areas A and B remove this restriction and move freely in those areas. "
Google maps are not far from the subject, where the Palestinians take their vulnerable coverage of the West Bank for example on their own, but the company denies there are political considerations on the subject. "Some areas are more difficult to map than others because of a set of Factors including lack of quality data and lack of infrastructure on the ground. "
Google is trying to change this. In April, it sent its cars in an effort to increase the maps, after large Palestinian cities in the West Bank, such as Ramallah, Jericho and Bethlehem, for years had been largely empty.
Other people have taken on cartographic challenges. During the Gaza war in 2014, OpenStreetMap led by programmer and geographer Maroun led mapping efforts to assess the extent of damage and destruction. The Dubai-based delivery company Karim, In June, based in Ramallah, with its own map, but stopped service in November after pressure from the Palestinian Authority.
The Ramallah Municipality is working to increase public Wi-Fi networks, so problems related to the lack of 3G services are becoming less and the US-based The Rebuilding Alliance has organized the Mapathon event, where Palestinian and international programmers record buildings And agricultural land in villages that have not been identified earlier.
Various people contribute to the open source mapping process, one of them Ben Zion, 23, a map painter from the Israeli occupation of Rehovot, who has been working on open source mapping since 2009.
Ben Zion is one of the main contributors to the maps of the West Bank, where he plans roads, sites and farms around the settlement bloc in Gush Etzion. Like many Israeli Jews, he has little contact with the Palestinians. He has never thought of how navigation maps and applications Work on it from the other side.
* This report is translated on the Wired website
Source: Arab Technology News
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